


Leave comfort root-room

by marginalia



Category: Wilder Girls - Rory Power
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:21:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27442585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginalia/pseuds/marginalia
Summary: Maybe the wild already in her was enough. Maybe one had fought off the other. Maybe the Tox itself had been in her from the beginning, waiting quietly to be awakened, a part of the island and a part of her. And when it finally came, easing out through her skin like a truer, fiercer version of herself, she was sorry that it stopped so soon::Reese is still little more than a child, but it's time for her to let down some walls.
Relationships: Reese Harker/Hetty Chapin/Byatt Winsor
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	Leave comfort root-room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaerstyne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaerstyne/gifts).



> Title from 'My own heart let me more have pity on' by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

A part of Reese had always been waiting, ever since she was small, hiding behind the barriers she had started to build even before her mother left. Hiding to protect herself from the world, sure, but also, she started to realize when the Tox came and freed them, protecting the world from her.

By the time it came for her, she thought it might never happen. Maybe the wild already in her was enough. Maybe one had fought off the other. Maybe the Tox itself had been in her from the beginning, waiting quietly to be awakened, a part of the island and a part of her. And when it finally came, easing out through her skin like a truer, fiercer version of herself, she was sorry that it stopped so soon, when only her left hand was a silver that betrayed the heat inside her, and her hair humming a cool white glow.

But it let her return to Hetty and Byatt, so it had to be enough. She’s protecting them too now.

::

Reese had never wanted anything to be given to her. She didn’t want to owe anyone anything, so everything she had must be earned. When the Tox came, she was ready to earn with strength, with her body, not with anything as soft as love or unreliable as professed loyalty. When they fought over the scraps of food, an animal strategy to meet an animal need, it kept them from getting too close to each other, and it showed them the power in their wildness and the power in their touch.

Sometimes Reese wishes she were nothing but body. Sometimes she feels that’s all she is.

::

When her dad left, it was the beginning of the end for her life on the island, and she knew it. The smell of him had been like dead things at the lowest of the tides. Not like the girls, who shifted to smoke and flame, Byatt arching as her spine split the skin, all of them burning like the phoenix. Reese tore herself apart at the fence, mourning everything at once. “Come on,” Hetty said, tugging her gently away from the fence and somewhere nearer to herself. “Let’s go up on the roof.”

It was almost too much, this kindness that came so naturally to them and never to her, to wrap their arms around her as they walked back to the school, Hetty ahead and Byatt behind as they climbed the stairs to the rooftop deck to see if there was anything to see. 

Reese stepped to the edge and gazed out at the woods which were now a tangled thing edging closer. She looked out into the trees as if she could stare right through them to her father, to their home, to her other life. She hoped she was far enough away that Hetty and Byatt couldn’t see her wanting.

Reese has spent her whole life wanting.

::

On the first day at Raxter, thirteen and full of fury and longing, she saw them, already a unit, already fitting together better than she had ever fit with anyone. They were children then and they’re not much more than children now, and she still doesn’t see how she fits with them. She tries to not want it. She tries so hard that when the wanting comes out it’s anger, a dare, an attempt to push everyone away.

It doesn’t work with Hetty, and Hetty and Byatt come as a set. Reese still doesn’t understand why they chose her: Hetty with her military child ability to fit in anywhere, and Byatt with her rich girl assumptions of acceptance smoothed over with lies like breathing. They ease in where Reese is all sharp edges, and before the Tox she let them ease the way. 

Now they need her edges.

::

Everything started to shift in the spring of that first year, during the third-quarter break, when they all stayed on campus. “You have to stay too,” Hetty told her, and Reese couldn’t deny her even though sometimes at the school it was like she couldn’t get enough air. 

“Let me show you something,” Reese said each day after breakfast, and she’d take them to a new secret place, slipping them bits of her soul, hoping they’d be gentle. The days were sunny and crisp, and they’d stay too long in all the hidden places, deep in the woods or overlooking the ocean, hands pulled up inside hoodie sleeves & tucked into pockets, arms linked, practically sitting in each other’s laps to keep warm. Reese watched them carefully, new creatures in her old spaces, and she’d relax a bit more every time to see that they made sense there. That they made sense, at least a little, with her.

The next time her dad said, “You should invite those girls to dinner,” she said yes, and tried not to look pleased at the sight of his surprised delight. She didn’t tell them in advance, just presented it as another adventure, taking them to her most secret place, to see how they fit in it, to show them how she fit there with her father.

But now it’s been torn apart.

::

They have never known each other anywhere but this island, and Reese has never known any place else, but they cannot stay. Reese knows this, knows her final choice was made when she followed Hetty into the dark to look for Byatt, and maybe it had been made even earlier, Byatt’s hands snug on her hips, Hetty’s breath warm on her neck. But breaking quarantine was the last thread snapping, dropping them into a series of terrible choices coming too quick to think, and some she can’t even think about after, trying to blink away the image of her father and the thing that took him, Hetty’s wild act of love and survival in ending it.

Her mother left them and the island, and Reese believed she’d never do that, never leave her father behind, but now she sets that behind a wall as she tries to think about what they’re moving towards and not what they’re leaving behind.

::

After, wherever they land (or if they land at all), Reese will wonder _what if the Tox never came?_ Would she have known what it was like to sleep with Byatt moving in ever closer, like she was trying to climb inside her skin? Would she have opened herself to Hetty in any way that couldn’t be dismissed as a joke? 

But it doesn’t matter. The Tox was here or the Tox came, it doesn’t matter which. What matters is that the Tox is. What matters is that they are. What matters is Byatt’s fingers carding through her hair, what matters is Hetty whispering _for so long I thought you were so cold, but you’re burning up_. What matters is the tangle of roots between them.

::

As they carry Byatt across the marsh to the waiting dinghy, Reese imagines her right hand shifting, fingers like tendrils, fingers like roots. They curl out and around Hetty and Byatt, sinking into their skin, tiny barbs whisperlocking them together. 

They can’t see more than two steps ahead of them. Maybe they’ll go ashore to a miracle. Maybe they’ll be lost at sea, each one pulling the others down, gills opening like Mona’s to bring them to a new life beyond imagining. Maybe the Tox will free them again. But it will free them together.


End file.
